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Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa
Books: Text Books: Africa: Item 1
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Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africaby Wendy Kann
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: A tragic, yet fascinating personal account, May 30, 2006 Reviewer:Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - When Lauren is killed, Wendy's past comes to stalk her like a jungle animal. She and Lauren and their sister Sharon grew up in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), and she realizes that she will have to go back to Africa in order to move forward with her life in America. The three sisters were raised dysfunctionally, amidst a landscape of madness, terror and war. Their parents were at odds --- their mother a rapidly deteriorating alcoholic, their father increasingly melancholy as events in their adopted home shifted like quicksand. Wendy, the oldest sibling, became a surrogate mother to Sharon and baby Lauren, a role that was forced on her by such incidents as the night Lauren disappeared. "The doorbell rang. I rushed to answer it and found a stranger there holding Lauren, who was blinking her round brown eyes in the soft outside light...My father was still at work. My mother had been in her bedroom all day. 'She belongs here,' I said finally, reaching out to take my little sister." A divorce eventually occurred and the girls' father remarried. His new wife was capricious and cold and made Wendy's life worse. Her father's eventual accidental death was whispered among the family to be a suicide, and the girls' mother passed away in an institution. Meanwhile in Rhodesia, rumors of war, acts of terror and rumblings of inevitable change became commonplace. "If you had asked anyone in the bars or clubs who we were fighting, only the most dull-eyed would have snarled, 'Kaffirs.' Some, more sober, might have said 'communism.' No one in my generation recognized that we were fighting to preserve an unsustainable way of life." After the war, there were still servants but they had to be paid more and there were many more locks on many more doors. As the old culture of colonialism died out to be replaced by a new kind of imperialism of the recently oppressed, Wendy made a passive escape by following her boyfriend to Europe and finally to Connecticut where she settled in to a comfortingly safe life raising her children and working as a counselor. Until she got the phone call about Lauren. Going back for the funeral, Wendy is caught up in the drama of Africa once again. She senses generations of pain that she had not before confronted, in her meeting with Moses, a servant hired by Lauren's husband to keep poachers away. Intrigued, Wendy asks to photograph Moses with his powerful rifle. Moses assents, but "there was nothing coming from his eyes...I stared hard at Moses and recognized powerlessness." Despite the rifle, Moses still fears the white lady and her potential to humiliate and harm. Lauren had been living in Zambia when her vehicle ran off a lonely road. Her son Luke, who was in the car with her, was just a baby. A major priority for the surviving sisters is arranging schooling and childcare for the boy. Revisiting Luke with Sharon when he is seven, Wendy comes to understand that Luke needs not just childcare now that his mother is gone; he needs a memory of Lauren. Wendy is able to tell him that the accident was "the car's fault" and that his mother loved him. CASTING WITH A FRAGILE THREAD is written episodically, poetically, by someone who didn't plan to write a book. It is Wendy's gift to Luke, her eulogy to her spirited sister Lauren, and her way of comforting herself for her enduring loss. --- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When Rhodesia declared independence from Britain in 1965, five-year-old Kann, the daughter of white Africans, would entertain her father's tennis party guests by singing, "Rhodesia has sanctions, and I can't have Marmite on my toast!" In her 20s, Kann left what had become Zimbabwe for the U.S. Drawn back to Africa by the sudden death of one of her sisters (in a 1999 car crash in Zambia), Kann found herself reexamining her earlier life. Her alcoholic mother—"There should be lots of words to describe drunk mothers, like the Inuit have words for snow"—and her morose father had divorced early; the stepmother who raised the girls after their father's suicide was barely able to manage. The country itself had always been in a state of war; as Kann realized when she first met her American husband, "I had never dated a man who hadn't killed someone, or at least been prepared to kill someone." Until recently, writers like Joseph Conrad and Paul Theroux have defined the white colonial experience in literature. Now, with Alexandra Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the dogs Tonight) and Kann, we're hearing from a different constituency: the daughters. Their tales, Kann's included, make for fascinating reading. Look for PW's upcoming Q&A with Wendy Kann. (May 8)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Framed by the tragic death of her youngest sister in a car accident in Zambia, Kann's memoir tells the story of her and her sisters' coming-of-age in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, at the twilight of the colonial era. Kann's parents' tumultuous marriage ended when Kann and her two sisters were very young, and because of their mother's drinking and mental instability, their father got custody of them. He soon married the well-intentioned but moody Gail, but it wasn't long before his debts caught up with him, and he committed suicide, leaving Gail with five children to care for. Kann decided to forgo college and drifted from secretarial job to secretarial job before meeting Mickey, an American man, whom she accompanied to New York and married. America is strange to her, but Kann makes it her home and settles in, until news of her sister's death jolts her out of her complacency. Although Kann is at times too circumspect about her feelings and point of view, her memoir vividly evokes life in colonial Africa. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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